Back to School

While school children try as hard as they can to enjoy the summer vacation, some of their elders are trying to take steps to ensure that when those students return to school they get the best education possible. A bicameral group of lawmakers in Washington recently rolled out what they call the America’s Opportunity Scholarships for Kids Act, which would provide federal money for vouchers that students in failing public schools could use to attend a better private institution. If the bill passes, a big and unlikely if, it will finally put right a serious shortcoming of the No Child Left Behind law.President Bush’s signature education reform proposal required troubled schools to make “adequate yearly progress” toward improving their performance or face consequences. Although the consequences were supposed to include giving students trapped in those schools a way out, that has proven an empty promise. The president’s proposal for vouchers got watered down in Congress five years ago so that right now students whose schools don’t educate them can only transfer to a better public school or a charter in the same district. Since there isn’t enough room in the good public schools, too many students are stranded.Now comes word that some lawmakers are willing to set that right. Reps. Sam Johnson of Texas and Howard “Buck” McKeon of California and Senators Alexander and Ensign have introduced bills that would authorize $100 million of federal money for private-school tuition or tutoring for low-income students in schools identified as failing under NCLB. They’ve got the right idea, although the details need some work.The biggest problem is that the money would be tied to NCLB’s standards, which if anything are too easy on the schools.In order to qualify as a “school in need of restructuring,”NCLB-speak for a failing institution, a school has to miss is adequate yearly progress targets for six years in a row. That’s enough time for a first-grader to graduate into middle school without learning how to read or for a ninth grader to spend four years in high school and still not be academically ready for college. By not making the money available in all schools, meantime, the program would not put any competitive pressure on schools that are merely mediocre to force them to improve before they fall into failure.All of that would be solved by voucherizing all federal education dollars in the first place, but in a Congress where even the modest proposal unveiled this week faces an uphill climb, that’s probably asking too much.The cause isn’t helped by a report released by the president’s own Education Department questioning whether private schools are really academically superior to their public peers.The study considered results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and purports to show that once you control for factors like family income or parents’ educational background, public schools are equal to or slightly better than private schools. Some are already raising questions about the study’s methodology. An education researcher at Harvard, Paul Peterson, told the Wall Street Journal that the study might have used a faulty measure for whether private-school students’ first language is English and that could have skewed the results. But even a long-time voucher advocate, Chester Finn, has noted that private schools are just as likely as public schools to use wacky curricula or lackluster textbooks.The point, though, is that academics are only part of the consideration when parents choose a school. One New York mother who tried to sue for vouchers earlier this year, Dianne Payne, cited basic safety as a reason for wanting vouchers for the youngest two of her five children after her middle daughter was driven to attempt suicide by bullies at a public school. It would be a mistake to let a study like this become an argument against vouchers. Individual parents will always have a better idea of whether their children are in the right school.

Back to School

Back to School

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